Mainstreaming AI with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NetApp

Many enterprise organizations struggle to find the right strategy and platform to enable AI success. Unlike traditional enterprise applications, AI apps are a relatively recent development for many IT departments. They are rapidly evolving, open source, and leading edge, but they lack proven approaches to meet the rigors of scaled production settings in enterprises.

The challenge

NetApp sponsored an IDC white paper, Storage Infrastructure Considerations for Artificial Intelligence Deep Learning Training Workloads in Enterprises. The survey found that end users for training workloads identified provisioning for new projects, scaling existing projects, and the ease and speed of loading datasets for new training runs as key ease-of-use benefits.

The solution

NetApp and NVIDIA are working together to enable customers to run their businesses using familiar infrastructure on many footprints—from virtualized containers with Kubernetes and private cloud deployments in corporate data centers to cloud-hosted AI development to services deployed on public clouds—all the way to the edge. 

For 20 years and more than 20,000 joint customers, NetApp and VMware have been defining the virtualized data center and delivering proven storage and virtualized infrastructure solutions, all in a unified digital environment that unlocks performance, efficiency, and cost savings for your virtualized applications.

Now NetApp supports NVIDIA AI Enterprise on VMware. And NetApp is the first enterprise storage partner to validate storage solutions with NVIDIA AI Enterprise for VMware environments.

Offered in addition to the successful NetApp^® ONTAP^® AI infrastructure solution built on NVIDIA DGX BasePOD for bare-metal deployments, this new platform from NetApp and NVIDIA delivers best-in-class data storage and data management with NetApp all-flash cloud integrated arrays and AI software. It supports NVIDIA AI Enterprise, an end-to-end, cloud-native suite of AI and data analytics software optimized and certified for the industry’s leading
virtualization platform, VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation. 

Easily deploy and scale

Simplify your data science workspace orchestration with the NetApp DataOps Toolkit. Run all your workloads on a single adaptable infrastructure platform so you can constantly optimize compute and storage usage across your hybrid cloud. Reduce TCO and simplify operations with flexible consumption. And with NetApp, your apps and data are always in the right place at the right time, whether on premises or in the cloud. Leverage the NetApp validated solution to deploy and manage AI workloads with optimized software.

Future-proof your investment

NetApp solutions are proven with design and deployment best practices for a wide variety of enterprise workloads. Confidently scale and maintain your always-on apps with built-in, end-to-end security across control and data planes. And meet the needs of artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads while continuing to serve your existing applications. We combine NetApp, NVIDIA, and VMware solutions to run our Lab on Demand environment for AI workloads. Our lab helps NetApp employees and partners get familiar with the most modern AI data pipeline workflows.

Boost performance

State-of-the-art compute demands state-of-the-art storage that can handle thousands of training images per second. You need a high-performance data services solution that keeps up with your most demanding deep learning training workloads. With NetApp all-flash storage, you can expect to get more than 2GBps of sustained throughput (5GBps peak). And there’s well under 1 millisecond of latency, while the GPUs operate at over 95% utilization.

The flexibility and scalability of the solution enable it to support and adapt to evolving workloads, making it a strong foundation for your future storage requirements. Modular storage building blocks give you a granular approach to growth, avoiding AI silos and simplifying management by leveraging virtualization to fold AI deployments into existing enterprise infrastructure.

For more information

To learn more about this solution, read the NetApp report NVIDIA AI Enterprise with NetApp and VMware. Learn about other joint solutions from NetApp and NVIDIA.